Are feds dropping the ball on environmental cases?

Looks like there might be a pretty important element missing in Houston's fight against pollution: federal prosecution of environmental crimes. According to the Chronicle, the last time prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office convicted anyone of an environmental crime on its own was 2004, when two Fayette County farmers were fined $500 for the illegal use of a pesticide. It's part of a downward trend in environmental prosecutions from the Southern District of Texas, which initiated 20 cases in 1998, nine in 2002 and none in 2005 and so far in 2006. Those numbers don't seem to jive with Houston's reputation as one of the country's smoggiest cities, some say:

"We've got more (pollution) than anyone else in the country and, therefore, we should have a lot of prosecutions," said Neil Carman, clean-air program director for the Sierra Club.

According to the Transactional Records Access Clearing House, local federal prosecutors ranked 78th of 94 offices nationwide in terms of environmental prosecutions between 2000 and 2005; locally, environmental cases ranked last among the 11 types of cases prosecuted. That's not because local federal prosecutors aren't trying, U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle said — rather, it's because there's no evidence for new cases. And there's no one dedicated to gathering it, apparently: Unlike some other major cities, Houston doesn't have a full-time environmental prosecutor because the high number of immigration and narcotics cases in the Southern District of Texas eat up most of the office's budget, DeGabrielle said: "The immigration and narcotics cases that come in are overwhelming. All this at a time that I am down 13 prosecutors that I cannot hire because of our budget," he told the Chron. DeGabrielle added that his office is involved in 17 environmental cases now.

Though there are other agencies that can prosecute environmental cases — the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has the primary responsibility for enforcing environmental laws in Texas, and the Harris County District Attorney's Office can also prosecute such cases locally — some people have said the federal government needs to take a more active role in cleaning Houston's air. "This is one of the largest cities and ports in the world, and we can't generate one clean-air case? A city the size of ours deserves to have an aggressive environmental team," Michael Shelby, the U.S. Attorney here from 2001 to 2005, said before his death in July.